What do you think policymakers in Europe and beyond should do to help strengthen national immunization programs?
We need to shift the mindset with regards to the value of vaccination across the lifespan. We have vaccinations for pediatrics, adolescents, adults, and older adults. This is what we call the “life-course” approach to vaccination.
With the pandemic, an important message was: You need to vaccinate yourself to protect others. But people also need to understand why it’s important for their own health to be vaccinated. Depending on who you are, your age, your health status, what you do, your work, your family environment—all of this gives you a good reason to be protected at some stage with specific vaccines.
But there’s so much more work to do. You can see it in governments’ budgets and how they fund their immunization programs. In Europe, almost 80% of governments spend less than 0.5% of their healthcare budget on their immunization program—a program that can prevent against 20 infectious diseases across a life course. And then we wonder why we are failing with regards to adult immunizations. The investment isn’t there.
Did COVID intensify vaccine skepticism and misinformation in Europe, as it did in the US?
Misinformation is extremely complex; it’s difficult to tackle. We’ve seen during the pandemic that the last thing that you want is discrepancy in communication between the EU member states, for example.
The European Medicine Agency was the first one to take on recommendations for the new vaccines. Member states then did their own communication, but they weren’t coordinated. That created contrary communication on specific vaccines, which led to a lot of hesitation, confusion, and skepticism. Member states need to coordinate their communication, and if they decide to take different positions from European authorities or neighboring countries, they need to explain why.
But specifically with vaccine hesitancy, there are decades of studies on this. We know what needs to be done and what should not be done—yet we continue to fail to address the heart of the issue.
We know, for instance, that healthcare providers are the most trusted sources of information when it comes to vaccines and vaccinations—they are more trusted than Google or social media. This is where we need to invest. We need to ensure that healthcare providers are trained—pharmacists, nurses, everybody that has a contact with the patients or citizens—to talk about vaccines and vaccination. And we need to get them involved in vaccine uptake.
The 2009 financial crisis was also a public health crisis. At a time when the global economy looks shaky, are there any lessons that we should carry into this moment?
The 2009 crisis was followed by a lot of austerity measures in Europe. You saw national healthcare budgets cut by as much as 20%—nurses and doctors lost their jobs, had salaries cut. This clearly affected access to and the quality of healthcare. Austerity measures often weaken the very pillar of a country that sustains the welfare of its people and economy. I hope we’ve learned those lessons. A lot of money has been spent to secure vaccines, to sustain economies during lockdowns. This has stressed states’ budgets; everybody’s looking at what cuts they can make. The war in Ukraine has added to those pressures. But healthcare budgets need to be sustained, protected. It is our resilience. Health is wealth.
How has the pandemic impacted the pharma industry’s reputation? Will the reputational boost from rapid vaccine development last?
I would hope so. But it’s worth restating: Strong public-private collaboration is what made the vaccine “miracle” possible. Nobody would have succeeded on their own. Everybody went together: regulators, government, academia, researchers, private sector—everybody.
Those collaborations aren’t a given. They take work. My hope is that we develop a way for those public-private collaborations to continue.
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Francesca Scassellati Sforzolini, a Partner in Brussels, leads Brunswick’s Healthcare & Life Sciences group in Europe.